In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity around the world. Many advanced networks offer wireless mobile communication services for voice calls, mobile messaging services (e.g. text and/or multimedia), and data communications. The data communication services, for example, enable surfing the world wide web, e.g., via a browser on mobile stations. As various value-added services are made available to mobile station users, more and more applications are installed and used on mobile stations causing sometimes mobile station (or device) issues.
As technologies have improved over the years, the features and functionalities supported in mobile stations have increased in number and complexity. This has also increased the varieties and complexities of troubles or issues that users may experience with their mobile stations.
When a user of a mobile station runs into a mobile station issue, the user often returns the mobile station at a retail store for device-check up, or the user calls a customer care representative of a carrier or service provider to report the mobile station issue for resolution. When the mobile station issue is reported at the retail store, information relating to the mobile station issue is at best collected by a representative at the retail store. The representative generally finds out what the mobile station issue is by talking to the user. Using a client terminal, the representative then remotely logs onto a technical support system of the carrier and manually enters the information about the issue into an issue tracking and management system (or a life cycle management tool) located at the carrier's (or service provider's) network for later review and resolution by a manufacturer of the mobile station or its software. Alternately, when the user of the mobile station calls and reports a mobile station issue to a customer care representative over the phone, the customer care representative collects the information as best as possible and manually enters the collected information relating to the reported issue into the issue tracking and management system for later review and resolution by a manufacturer of the mobile station or its software.
In both cases, data about the mobile station issue is collected from the user of the mobile station and manually entered into the issue tracking and management system by the retail store or customer care representative. However, the manufacturer (original equipment manufacturer or software manufacturer) often requires more than the information collected and provided by the retail store or customer care representative, for review and resolution of the reported mobile station issue.
In addition, there are often delays and a passage of time between the report of the mobile station issue and actual review of the reported mobile station issue by the manufacturer, because certain device operation information and logs are not collected and provided by the retail store or customer care representative. These delays and passage of time thus often hamper efforts of the manufacturer in troubleshooting and resolving reported mobile station issues in a timely manner, because after a few days, some diagnostic logs and information are lost or overwritten and thus become unavailable to the manufacturer for debugging purposes.
Further, some mobile diagnostic software, techniques of collecting information on a mobile station, and techniques of wireless transmission of the collected information from the mobile station to a network are known. However, a technique for integrating all needed elements in a seamless manner, from the mobile station to the manufacturer of the mobile station or its software, does not exist. That is, there is no end-to-end mechanism to facilitate rapid review and resolution of a mobile station issue by the manufacturer.
Hence, there is still a need for an improved or simplified technique for facilitating rapid review and resolution of mobile station issues by a manufacturer of mobile stations or its software.